Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Eva Perroni Hurricane Harvey, the most powerful hurricane to hit the United States in more than a decade, is expected to have a significant impact on Texan farmers, ranchers, and Texas’s agricultural export industry. With more than 50 inches of total rainfall already recorded, water damage to grain and vegetable crops, food warehouses, and transportation routes has begun to affect the food supply.
This July and August, the Heat Index (“feels like” temperature) seemed to climb into the “Danger” zone every day and stay there for hours, its peak often exceeding the forecast. Could we be approaching deadly weather already? What about other, even muggier parts of the planet?
The EIA has once again undercut its previous estimates for U.S. oil production, offering further evidence that the U.S. shale industry is not producing as much as everyone thinks.
The programmes that we deliver in the museum, whether they be from schools to life-long learning, to graduate start-up businesses to whatever, how do those empower the makers of the future? And we understand how making makes us feel better. This is a building that was run in the early 18th century off one power source and produced 300 million yards of silk thread, a day, off a water source. And now it’s run off a power station. So it’s to open up that conversation about what is the future of that?
What animates you? What is the spiritual or religious impulse underneath the work you do to save those parts of our world that you want to protect and nurture? Is there a spiritual or religious teacher or movement that inspires you to do the uncomfortable work of politics or social change? What role, if any, does faith play in whatever you do that brings you out of your private life and into the public square? How do you “keep the faith” as commentator Tavis Smiley often says in signing off?
Craig Russell’s Fragment succeeds on multiple fronts. On one level, it’s a fascinating work of idea-fiction that tells a tale of first contact between humans and whales. It also spins an absorbing thriller yarn in which a motley group of humans and a lone, heroic whale join forces to face an unprecedented threat. On a third level, the book offers important insights into the gravest ecological reality of our time, climate change, without ever coming across as didactic or preachy.
To counter poor labor practices, gig workers and entrepreneurs are now taking matters into their own hands by launching their own digital platforms for various services. Called “platform cooperatives,” these businesses bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance, to the digital world.
Join James Howard Kunstler as he interviews Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg for the Kunstlercast. Richard talks both about his book Our Renewable Future, coauthored with PCI Fellow David Fridley, and his latest essay There’s No App for That: Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss.
Hurricane Harvey has taught us many lessons, but the most valuable may be the oldest lesson of all, one we humans have been learning – and forgetting – since the dawn of time: how much we all have to lose when climate and weather disasters strike.
In the beginning, there was a Miocene ape – the common ancestor of our genus Homo and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas. It bequeathed to us its descendants, so the primatologists suggest, a tendency towards (particularly male, but also female) status ranking. Do we need to go that far back into our evolutionary past in order to understand the nature of status competition in contemporary societies? Perhaps it’s a sociological heresy to say so, but I think the answer is quite possibly yes.
Climate change is not the biggest problem facing the nation; talking about it is. Until we learn to do the one, the other may never be sufficiently solved to stave off the worst of its potential impact. The greatest of these may be a functioning federal government. Actually, talking about anything in today’s partisan charged atmosphere appears to be the problem of paramount prominence. I will focus here only on climate change.
What can writing do about this? What problems can art solve? In one sense, the answers are: nothing, and none. But in another sense, these are the wrong questions. ‘All civilisations’, we wrote in the manifesto, ‘are built on stories.’ When the stories fail, we need to know how to tell different ones. We need to have the perspective to understand the failure, and the imagination to offer up new ways of seeing.
